Strategies for Interpreting Qualitative Data

Martha S. Feldman (Stanford University PhD, 1983) is the Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public Management at the University of California, Irvine.  Her current research on organizational routines explores the role of performance and agency in creating, maintaining, and altering these fundamental organizational phenomena.  Her research on public management examines how we can use our understandings of organizational process to create inclusive management practices.  Her research in qualitative and interpretive methods develops ways of gathering and analyzing data that help researchers open the black boxes they confront in theory and in informants’ descriptions.  She is a Senior Editor for Organization Science (as of June 2006), the Book Review Editor for International Public Management Journal, and serves on the editorial boards of Advances in Organizational Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies.  She has written 4 books and dozens of articles on the topics of organization theory, public management and qualitative research methods. She received the Administrative Science Quarterly′s 2009 award for Scholarly Contribution for her work on organization routines.

This book goes into great detail to illustrate with examples analysis and interpretation strategies for interpreting data from a very personal perspective. As such, the examples really help to illustrate to the reader how powerful these strategies are, and serve as an assistant to wider methodology and analysis texts in this field.

• IntroductionEthnomethodologySemiotic AnalysisDramaturgical AnalysisDeconstructionConclusion